On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Gerry Creager wrote:
My preference has proven to be to distribute loads and use separate systems 
for hard-core processing. LDM can be memory intensive.
I do too; I use 3 machines to do all the grunt work. And this go-around, I 
made sure I had a minimum of 4 GB of RAM.
 Since I do a lot of 
relaying here, too, I dedicate one system (really two... long story) to that, 
and then have several others filing, processing, etc.  I don't recall if we 
went to SATA-II.  Since losing my sys admin and taking on those duties, I've 
not gotten into a box to check explicitly, but I thought we had.  That said, 
they'd all be on CoRAID systems as we rarely keep more than local system disk 
in machines anymore.
I'm a one-man band myself, as I suspect many of us are here. That means I 
have to have something that works quickly out of the box, that I know how 
to deal with, and be reliable. And cheap! Of my 9 years with Redhat Linux 
(and 7 issuances of their Fedora release), I feel guilty sometimes using 
it. I do report bugs, but haven't paid a dime. To say that I have "gotten 
my money's worth" is an understatement.
Think SAS rather than conventional SCSI.  We've started migrating to that for 
our RAID shelves and some of the Sun servers (running Centos) we have.
I reveal my ignorance here by asking what is SAS? Looked it up on 
Google ("SAS storage"). Then I hit Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI
It supports speeds of up to 3 gb/sec, but that's what SATA 2 does. It does 
say it will support speeds of 12 gb/sec by 2012, but for now, I don't see 
an advantage.
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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                                  ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
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